A Study On The Relationship Between Perceptual Learning Style Preferences And English Learning Strategies Among Students In Grade Seven

The present thesis attempts to investigate the perceptual learning style preferences and the language learning strategies of the students in Grade Seven, to identify whether there is significant difference in the learning styles and strategies between boy students and girl students, and to figure out whether the correlation exists between students’ perceptual learning style preferences and the choice of language learning strategies.The thesis started from the introduction, the next part is the relevant literature review on the learning style and language learning strategy, which provide foundation for the present thesis.In order to conduct this investigation, two hundred and nine seventh graders participated in this study. Of the 209 participants,112 were boys, and 97 were girls. The instruments for data collection were the Perceptual Learning Style Preference Questionnaire (PLSPQ) and the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL). The former was used to identify students" perceptual language learning style preferences and the latter was used to examine their language learning strategies. After collecting the surveys, the data were entered into the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 13.0 for statistical analysis. The findings of this study were summarized as follows: The students in Grade Seven have no perceptual learning styles as their major ones. No learning style is predominant. The seventh graders prefer the individual learning styles most while tactile learning style is used the least. Auditory, visual and group learning styles stand the second, third and fourth position and kinesthetic learning styles are the second last.In the present study, the memory and metacognitive strategies belong to the high level group, and cognitive, compensation, affective and social strategies belong to the medium level group. In detail, the memory strategies are the most frequently used. The cognitive strategies are the least choice out of six categories. The metacognitive strategies are the second popular. The affective, social and compensation strategies remain the third, fourth and fifth position.There are no significant differences between boy students and girl students in perceptual learning styles. Except for group learning styles, boy students" other five learning styles are slightly higher than girl students’There is no significant difference in memory, cognitive, compensation, metacognitive and affective learning strategies between boy students and girl students, except for social strategies. What is more, the study found that girls are higher users than boys among the students in Grade Seven involving six learning strategies.It was found that auditory, tactile, kinesthetic and individual learning styles are positively related to memory strategies; auditory and individual learning styles are related to cognitive strategies; tactile learning styles have significant relations with compensation strategies; kinesthetic learning styles are related with affective strategies; group learning styles are related to social strategies; no learning style has significant relationship with metacognitive strategies.Based on the findings, the implications of teaching and learning are proposed. Firstly, on condition of catering to the most preferred learning styles, teachers are supposed to develop those least preferred styles. Secondly, language instructors should identify characteristic individual style preferences and adjust teaching methods to match different individual styles of learning to optimize the students’language achievement and proficiency. Thirdly, teachers should encourage the learners to stretch their learning strategies. Fourthly, teachers should not have a biased attitude towards boy students or girl students if they have any. Last, teachers should integrate learning strategy training into regular classroom in a natural and explicit way, or use some lessons as learning strategy training purposely. As for students, they should raise the awareness of their own learning styles by questionnaires or other methods, and develop effective strategies suitable to their particular learning styles by following their teachers’instruction or by self-training. Moreover boy students diminish gender prejudice in learning language. At the end, some suggestions for future study were proposed.